Insanity: Part Two
by Rogue Novelist
Summary: Continuation of "Some Secrets Are Best Kept Hidden: Part One". Rating may go up for use of language.
1. Chapter 1

Dark. Black. Destitute. And deathly mute. A set of sparkling porcelain orbs had been looking upon the darkness for some time now. Those empty eyes shifted occasionally to the great, illuminated red markings that cut through the midnight. They were of no great significance at all. They used to be. They used to mean everything. But now it was nothing. The hieroglyphics were just there to meet the glass and bounce back into the nothing where they had originated.

Morton Rainey had been lying motionless in the realm of darkness, so often called his room during the hours of light, for minutes and minutes on end, and hundreds and thousands of seconds. His eyes were fixated upon the ceiling above, as if he were expecting something from it. As if it were going to use divine sorcery to vanquish all of his ailments, fears, and issues. But it wasn't clear if the ceiling was there at all. The author only assumed it was in its place. It could have been stolen and replaced with a black sheet or a vast amount of plastic wrap and Mort wouldn't have been able to determine that it was no longer there. All of it was a shadow. The demon of shade devoured every little corner of the room. Every object. Even the human lying there.

And there he laid, on that strange mattress he had owned. The mattress was unlike any other. There were no springs involved. He loathed it. Tempur Pedic. The super mattress that astronauts used in space. Joy. He was better off sleeping on a giant kitchen sponge. Mort saw the bed as an evil and sinister object. He would sit on the bed. There was no bounce to it. He would fall and hit it with a muffled thud. Faintly at first, and then growing stronger as the seconds passed, there was a hiss. Air. He'd sink in and voila! His ass was stuck in the bed! He would swing his legs over; THUD, hiss...Hiss...HISSSSSSSS. And his legs are grasped by the vile object. He'd lay back. Arms and back hit. THUD, hiss...Hiss...HISSSSSSSSS. Goody! Those were stuck, too! The only thing that saved his head from disappearing into the mattress was his trusty goose-down pillow.

Rainey's mouth opened up and his eyes closed in a long, drawn-out yawn. 'I wonder if there's anybody out there like me,' a thought posed. 'Just one person...' And as he mused this, his lids unhurriedly lowered...Lowered...Slowly...Slowly...SHUT.

With a sudden jolt to the bed frame and a spontaneous gleeful cry articulating words not yet distinguishable by sleep hazed ears, Mort's reflexes forced his body off of the bed and colliding into the near wall, sending the man plummeting into the tight space in between that same wall and the bed. Oh, he knew he shouldn't have moved that bed. He knew it.

The novelist's gaze met those of jubilant green irises after he managed to get the muscles in his neck to synchronize and move. His alert ears were greeted by heavy laughter. He flung his arm over and out onto the bed, grasped the blankets, and pulled. Instead of his body moving into the sheets, the sheets moved into his body and jammed him tighter into the scant amount of space. Another roar of laughter. "Oh, you're too funny!"

"Shmmmff! Gkds! mff!" the voice cried through the blankets.

Seconds after the plea, the frame of the bed inched away, freeing the trapped creature. Flustered, he threw himself back into the mattress and pulled the covers over his head.

"Oh, come on, Sleepy!" the voice rang. There was a sharp jab to the upper arm. He moved not a bit. "Are you okay? It's three in the afternoon! Get up! GET UP!"

"Erg...Cora, this isn't a good time," He groaned wretchedly from under the red plaid covers, not unlike that of a man in bed with critical illness.

She laughed. "Of course it's not! You're going to the orthodontist to get your braces off, remember?"

He paused for a moment, brain computing her question. Orthodontist?..."Oh, SHOOT. Yes, I do!" he returned, slinging the blankets off to the side in a solitary, fluid motion. In a hurried pace he sat and the stood, excessively prompt as he was prone to doing, and ran blindly for just a moment. "You coming with me this time?"

"Eh. I wasn't planning to," responded she from the bedroom as she adjusted the newly made bed. "Why? Do you need some moral support or something?"

Mort sighed," No, no. It's all right. I'm a big boy now." He swiped a fine-toothed comb through his rogue half blonde, half dark brown locks and shuffled down the stairs getting dressed. Cora whistled teasingly as the pajama shirt came off.

"Woo! The pants now! Take the pants off!" she whooped.

A smile found itself coming upon the author's facade. He got such a kick out of her sometimes. "Hey, can I take your Porsche?"

"How much do you have?"

"Err... I'll take my shirt off again when I come home."

"Done deal, bucko. Go ahead. The keys are in my coat. BE CAREFUL with her! I'll bite off your head if anything happens to her!"

Ah. The Porsche 911 Turbo. It was a breathtaking model in its midnight metallic-azure shadow. Well, it HAD to be following the totaled Mustang convertible in the most recent mishap.

White began bleaching the revolting bathroom sink when the front door slammed unexpectedly shut, sounding Mort's leave.

It was the first time in weeks since she'd been back to clean, with her recovering from a seared back and him a busted leg, she hadn't the time or the effort to clean. She persuaded herself that she didn't miss him much at all, and that he was just the ordinary customer. She convinced herself to imagine that she would have been dancing while dusting in any house, getting the Lysol in the customer's face by misfortune, getting assailed by the house owner in her car on the way to the hospital... Dealing with a schizophrenic...Getting into an accident. That terrifying disaster left its most predominant mark upon the maid's soft-fleshed back and a hideous scar on her upper right arm. It resurfaced the memories that she longed to forget.

Brilliant emerald eyes ogled back at her when she peered into the soiled mirror of the medicine cabinet. A dash of Windex splattered against the glass and distorted the somewhat jolly countenance, and reappeared as black orbs as she wiped it away.

"What the...!" The girl leant closer to the reflective glass and laid eyes upon a facade that didn't belong to her.

She leapt back. "Oh, good GOD!' vociferated the maid, leaping away from the mirror in alarm. She reeled around as the bathroom door slid open with a lingering squeal. "Mort, I'm so glad you've"the words of relief cut short abruptly when the rusted blade of an aged hatchet launched itself for her head. Cora peered up rigidly. His frozen, charcoal eyes stared and chilled hers.

The assailant wrenched the axe out of the tiled wall and swung again, just barely missing his horrified victim as she burst into flight. Cora took to the stairs as a flowerpot flew for the back of her skull. Her foot slithered on the edge of the first step and sent her plunging onto the stairs on her bottom, leaving her in a shower of clay shards. No time was left for her to stand, so with a swift thought, she pushed herself off and slid down the rest of the flight, just in time for the hatchet to miss her spine.

The criminal beckoned her with a malicious intention, though he coated it with amicability, "C'mere, you perdy little thing. Come on, Miss White. I won't hurt ya."

The maid fled directly into the modest kitchen and took up a stainless steel butcher's stiletto from the cutting block. Headed on a course for her face, the petite axe launched itself with brute force. She followed it with enlarged optics up until just before contact with the skin of her nose, and then drove the thick blade through the center of the goon's lean thigh. A blood curdling cry filled the still air and he limped away, just incase she had grabbed another knife to strike again.

In roughly an hour's time, as Cora had predicted before, the Porsche came speeding down the road and stopped in the driveway with a skid-screech that left tire markings along the dirt. The music inside was blasting, the mega bass sent vibrations into the ground. A moving discotheque.

Mort, who felt free from the restraint of braces, got out of the car just as the cloud of dust from the extravagant parking settled. He ran his tongue over his smooth teeth and danced his way onto the porch. A tap, a thud, a shuffle, and the key popped into the hole. A tight spin and the door flung open.

"LUCY! I'M HO...Wooaaahh. Some cleaning, Cor. What happened here?" he posed, brushing a blonde tress out of his deep-chocolate eyes and musing over the catastrophe. The house was cleaner before he left! "Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do."

He had expected some sort of precisely thought out explanation coming from his innocent angel-pie of a maid in the kitchen, but he had heard no voice and no movements. The whole house held still with bated breath.

His gaze was caught by a trail of blood almost immediately. The thick, violet-red river oozed from the front porch into the kitchen. The light spirits he once had turned into ash and his pounding heart leapt up into his throat. ...Suicide?

"Cora? Cora?"

Rainey darted into the kitchen, and regretted it. A hatchet lay on the tiled floor amongst shattered china and mugs, all in a concoction of bleach, orange dish detergent, and blood. Knives lay askew on the counter top; all the drawers had been pulled out. Curious footprints led the baffled author towards the pantry when the doors exploded and a blur of color burst out.

Before his skillful mind was able to piece together anything, he discovered himself eye to eye with a bloodthirsty fiend whose optics shone with a maniacal fire of mixed fear and the bravery provoked by that same fear. She had pummeled him to the ground and the poor man was forced to keep still by a menacing blade pressing down upon his neck.

"HOLY CRAP, CORA! What has gotten into you?"

Her eyes softened, the blade moved away.

"Mort, I've something to tell you, and you're going to think I'm absolutely out of my mind."


	2. Chapter 2

Note: I'm really sorry, but this chapter is going to have to be short. If I wrote any more, it would spoil the surprise of the chapters to come.

"And that was what happened," Cora finished in a shaking voice, her cup and saucer rattling in her quivering hands.

Mort gazed at her inquisitively. "Mhmm. All right, that's all I wanted to know," he replied with an encouraging grin. A steady hand aided her in placing the clattering cup and saucer on the cherry oak coffee table. "Can I just take a look at your arms one last time?"

The house cleaner sighed. "Mort, if I were going to commit suicide, I would have been dead LONG before you came home. Now, if you'd excuse me, I'd like to clean up this huge mess I made. After all, it's my job."

"Let me help you."

"If you help me, don't pay me."

White took up her rag and headed for the path of blood that seemed to have drifted away from the river form and creep into each crack of the hardwood flooring. Rainey followed close behind with an old t-shirt. She spun around for a moment to impede him from assisting her, but seeing as he had not paid much consideration to what was in front of him, he advanced and collided with the delicate frame of the young woman. He tripped frontward, she toppled backwards, and as he landed on top of her, the door flung open and the profile in the entryway froze, hesitant of how to respond.

"Errr…Did I come at the wrong time, Mort?"

Without getting up, Morton peered at the silhouette in the doorway. "Uh…No, actually, you didn't.

"What is that all over the floor? Is that blood!"

"No, no. It's, uh…"

"It's wine," Cora interjected. "As a matter of fact, it's my fault."

"Yeah," the author agreed. "But I really think it was my fault."

"Okay. Should I just pick up the story later…?"

"No. You can come in and get it from my desk. Don't mind us."

"Who is that?" Cora hissed in Mort's ear as the visitor passed without a second glance at the two on the floor.

"My publisher."

"Why can't you get off of me?"

Mort brandished a massive, roguish smirk. "Because I like it here."

She snorted and gazed up at him, pulling off his broad frames. "Well, you're going to have to get off…And I think you should start wearing contact lenses, or at LEAST get a fresh pair of specs. These are sort of…Nerdy," she plainly told him before giving him a vigorous jostle. He tumbled over to the side.

"Nerdy? …NERDY! Is that all you can say to me?" he snapped, combating a modest smile. His voice went high-pitched, as to poke fun at her. "Oh, Morton, darling, you should get a fresh pair of spectacles. Those are nerdy."

He had anticipated a laugh or a giggle, but the girl's eyes appeared fixated upon something other. He followed her gaze out onto the driveway. She turned to him. "Isn't that your dog?"

"…What dog?"

"You only have pictures of him all over the place."

"OH! Y' mean Chico?"

"Yeah. He's out there," she stated blankly, with an airy tone. A slender finger indicated.

"Cor, nothin's out there."

"Yes, there is. Chico's out there. How could you let your own puppy sit out there in the cold?"

The publisher came romping down the stairs. With a leap over Cora, he fled out the door. "See ya, Mort!"

"Bye, Rob!"

The maid released an ear piercing screech. "MORT! HE'S GOING TO RUN OVER THE DOG! MORT! STOP HIM!" she hastily screamed, seizing her companion by the shoulders and shaking some sense into him.

He peered into her eyes…A rabid wolf, perhaps. There was a fire in her eyes that leapt up and devoured the normality of its host. Not dissimilar to that of an infected animal. Had she been bitten?

"CORA. CALM DOWN. There is nothing out there. CHICO IS DEAD. Shooter killed him."

"But he's RIGHT THERE!"

Concerned, Rainey took her up and placed her on the couch. "You're still in shock. That's all. Take a nap. Naps always do the trick."

"I think you're suffering from more than just schizophrenia, Morton. Your DOG is sitting behind the tire of a Chevy 4X4 that's about to back up, and you're telling me that Shooter killed him."

"Sleep, Cora. Just sleep."

"I'M TELLING YOU, YOU'RE GOING TO BE SORRY!"

"C-C-Cora! SLEEP! I'll take care of it! I'll go check on him, okay?"

She nodded and pulled a blanket over herself, now quieted by the fact he was going to let the dog inside…If he were still alive.

Mort trudged out the door, shuddering from the spontaneous burst of disturbed shouting. Psh. There was no dog. Chico was long dead by now. He kicked up dirt as he walked along the road, following what appeared to be a fluid leakage from Rob's truck. "Better go call 'im up and let him now before something bad happens..." he pondered, still following the trail of moist dirt. For a moment he peered up into the gray sky, and stumbled into the dust as he was again, not giving his attention to what should have been given attention. Out of curiosity, he looked over his shoulder to see what had tripped him. A lump. Just a lump in the road. ...Freaking litter bugs. He hauled his body up and followed his track, only to find that it no longer existed.

The lump wriggled. The wind? There was no wind. It twitched again. It snorted, and fell limp again. Morton proceeded towards it with all prudence. A silver pendant on a black collar caught his eye. It was a dog. His heart sank. Cora, as always, was accurate. She must have thought it was Chico for the reason that it perhaps looked reminiscent to Chico. How could Rob have not taken note of it?

Now crouching near it, the man inspected it. The corpse was horrible. It was a young dog, beautiful pelt, probably adorable little eyes...But the fleshy tissue had been worn to shreds on the reverse side it laid on, exposing dark red meat and a defined ribcage embellished with thousands of tiny blue and purple veins. Its purple intestine had been drawn out quite a few feet, and the flies had already begun gathering. The most he could do, he felt, was inform the agonizing owner about his or her dead puppy. His fingers ran over the soft fur and it reached for the tag. He plucked it off and peeked, just interested in whose dog it could have been.

Without any sort of last emotion, Mort swaggered back, his eyes fluttering shut, and his conscience leaving him.

The tag flew out of his hand and slid across the dirt:

"CHICO RAINEY"


	3. Chapter 3

A gasp for oxygen had gone unheard in the attendance of a riotous growl of thunder. Deep amber eyes, pools of black in the blue-tinted midnight glow the outdoors constantly appeared to contain in the hours of twilight, fluttered open only to have mechanically shut at an inundation of glacial rainwater. A feeble groan escaped lips lined with the azure hue of a frosted body.

The novelist heaved his cumbersome weight--he felt as though he was dealing with twofold the quantity he essentially weighed-- from the suctioning, clay-like mud and threw back the tresses that the water had plastered to his face. It was nigh impracticable to perceive anything; the nighttime seemed to possess a larger dimness than natural, and his beloved spectacles were long vanished by now. He trudged forward nonetheless, muck grasping at his shoe at each step and all, with only the faith in his sense of direction. Had he been asked which day he would have considered the worst, it wouldn't have been the time when he had gotten divorced, it wouldn't have been that car accident...It would have been the current time. This was it. The worst possible night in the history of Morton Rainey. If only he could click his heels together and stated how he thought there was no place like home.

But had he in reality yearned to revisit the abode that bound him to so many agonizing experiences? Was it just another instinct to return to the place where heat and provisions were guaranteed? Perhaps the latter. Naught remained in that house for him. It kept alive those memories that he longed to let fade and drift away into the realm of the forgotten.

Yet...There was a maid. A woman. But she was only a maid. And a female, but again, only a maid. He simply fancied her possibly due to the verity he had been destitute of feminine fondness for such a long period of time. He wasn't concerned for her. It was her fault he ended up outside in the foremost!

Sighing, he plowed forth until his optics managed to catch sight of two silhouettes on his front porch. The trim stature of the biped bent and placed a hand on the top of the quadruped, whose pleasure radiated through movements. A yip echoed across the sheets of icy rain. He halted briefly and mused over the picture before him. With a quirk of a brow, he marched towards his house.

"Morton Rainey! Good God! I was about to send the fire brigade after you!" Cora scolded with a intimation of respite. "Get in here and out of the rain, you lunatic!"

Temperate arms welcomed his shuddering body, caring not about how sopping wet he had been. Warm fingers ran themselves through his matted mane, and a tender sweep of silk lips against his own calmed his entire soul. "Where did you go?" she posed softly.

"I went to find that dog."

"Which dog were you following? The dog ran onto the porch after the truck drove away!"

"Oh?"

"Yeah! I let him inside."

"Is he mine like you told me he was?"

"As a matter of fact...He was! He is!"

Rainey furrowed his brows in utter bewilderment. Nothing ever seemed to want to make an ounce of sense. Ever. Cora detected the perplexity within him and immediately acted to relieve it. "Chico! Chico, come!"

A patter indicated fingernails along the hardwood floors, and a heavy sliding indicated the dragging of a leash. Chico always dragged a leash around when we wanted to run around outdoors.

"Cora, Chico died a long time ago."

"You're not right in the mind. Chico!"

"No. You don't understand. Chico is GONE. He had a screwdriver in his skull that last time I saw him."

"He's perfectly FINE, Mort. Except I think he's a little blind. He's got cataracts."

Bright, cloudy eyes caught Mort's as the four-legged creature came bounding. At once, the author's facial features softened, almost as if he had forgotten that Chico did indeed die a while ago, and he kneeled to greet a faithful companion. To test the truth of Cora, he reached to the silver tag hanging from the collar. His eyes eagerly scanned it: "CHICO RAINEY". It was a gag. A sick joke. He gaped at Cora in distress and repulsion. "How could you!" he admonished, letting the dog's collar go.

Cora snapped back in protest, "How could I what? You think I'm lying to you? The dog is standing right there! I can't believe you, Mort! I...I just can't!" And with that, she turned away, face in her hands, weeping. She had been so insulted and erroneously accused!

Morton stood up, appearance screening almost instantaneous regret for his hasty and mindless actions. "I'm-I'm sorry," he apologized, taking the woman in his arms. But she refused him profusely as soon as he placed his arms around her. He made a second attempt, just for kicks. She responded more sensibly, putting her own arms around him, and cried on his shoulder.

The whole ordeal was odd, actually. Cora was never known to cry so much over such a little situation. In fact, it would have been more characteristic of her to come back with an almost humorous response. He could feel her warm tears on his shoulder, seeping across his cream-colored sweater. He looked at her. A dark, violet red doused his entire shoulder, and it was certain that it hadn't been a cut on him.

"Look at me, Cora."

She raised her head to face him. Her skin remained as flawless as it had been when he left...With respect to injuries, at least. The same burgundy that had tainted his shirt also stained her visage.

"Oh, nothing's been the same," she sighed. "I apologize for the crying. I overreacted."

"Not the same?"  
"No. I think I'm getting sick. My head's been hurting a lot lately. It's like there's something in the back of my head trying to talk to me. And my eyes have been KILLING me. I've had to keep them shut sometimes. Like now."

"Maybe fumes from the household cleaning products?"

"I've never been this bad before."

"Have you seen a doctor lately?"

"Not since the accident."

"You should go, you know. It might be-—Chico, stop it!" Mort glanced downward at the dog, which seemed to be oblivious to the seriousness of the situation by the way he kept dragging that leash back and forth over their feet. The author was sent into a stew of utter bewilderment when he realized Chico possessed no leash. He ran across Mort's feet again, and a warm dragging...

"UGH! CHICO!" he said with a leap out of absolute dismay. "What IS that?" He kneeled to scrutinize his puppy, and was thrown by the spectacle of the animal's side, where the thin flesh and onyx pelt were ragged to shreds, and the outline of a ribcage under purple meat could be distinguished. Half of his blood-spattered organs were spilling out of this side. Far-flung along the floor laid a blue-violet intestine.

Mort stumbled back and crawled towards Cora's feet. He stuttered, "D-D-...D-D-D...D-D-D-Do you s-see th-that?"

"See...What?" she questioned as her response.

He scrambled to his feet, peering at the dog in distress. "You don't see THAT!"

"No. I don't see anything."

He turned to her. "How can you not see anything? We've got a fricken ORGAN revelry c--" He paused, musing over Cora's eyes. They seemed...Dark. And quite red around the edges. "Look here."

She turned to him, her eyes simply nothing but black holes in her head, blood spurting out of each socket with every heartbeat. "What?"

"GOD! WHY ME! WHY ME!"


End file.
